U.S. Arms Transfers to Israel, with Brian Finucane and Josh Paul
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 November 2023
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
Last month, following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, President Biden announced that his administration would ask Congress for “an unprecedented support package for Israel’s defense,” totaling $14.3 billion. Such a package would supplement the defense aid Israel already receives from the U.S. According to Jonathan Guyer in Vox, “Israel has received about $3 billion annually, adjusted for inflation, for the last 50 years, and is the largest historical recipient of US security aid.”
But with civilian casualties in Gaza mounting, including the reported killing of thousands of Palestinian children, likely with weapons of U.S. origin, a recent article in Foreign Affairs by Brian Finucane asks, “Is Washington Responsible for What Israel Does With American Weapons?”
To talk through that essay, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Brian, a Senior Adviser at the International Crisis Group and former attorney adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. State Department, as well as Josh Paul, a former Director in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which oversees U.S. arms transfers, who resigned in protest over the U.S. government’s provision of weapons to Israel for use in the conflict in Gaza. They discussed the scale and process of U.S. weapons transfers, the domestic and international law that govern these transfers, and whether the U.S. is complicit and liable for war crimes committed with its weaponry. They also discussed why it would be a mistake to rely solely on the law of war to bring an end to the death and destruction in Gaza.
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| 0:45.7 | everyone else's. |
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| 0:50.4 | T's and C's apply. Check the Uber app. And if you look at where those arms have gone over the course of the last decade, Myanmar, Azerbaijan, and a number of other countries where |
| 1:06.0 | I think we would have deep foreign policy concerns, as well as a number of countries where |
| 1:09.9 | we find ourselves competing with this defense industrial base that we ourselves |
| 1:13.6 | have subsidized. So I think that's another area where we should be really sort of |
| 1:17.7 | pausing and thinking about how our funding and our assistance ends up |
| 1:21.5 | working against us. |
| 1:22.3 | I'm Charlie McBryan. funding and our assistance ends up working against us. |
| 1:23.6 | I'm Charlie McBryan, managing editor of Law Fair, and this is the Law Fair Podcast, November 28, |
| 1:29.0 | 2023. |
| 1:30.4 | Last month, following Hamas's October 7th attack on Israel, President Biden announced |
| 1:34.8 | that his administration would ask Congress for, quote, an unprecedented support package for Israel's |
| 1:39.0 | defense, totaling $14.3 billion. Such a package would supplement the defense aid Israel |
| 1:44.6 | already receives from the US. According to Jonathan Geyer and Vox, quote, |
| 1:48.0 | Israel has received about $3 billion annually, adjusted for inflation for the last 50 years and is the largest |
... |
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